Hi Phil13, My 840PRO also failed a few day ago. A check also shows only 0.93GB, SN: nil and Firmware: IE'. And when you go to do the performance test on magician, it says "no volumes found on selected drive". I lost all my past 8 months worth of travel pics. Is there anyone who can help? What are the chances of recovering my data?Reply

I pulled the trigger on an 840 a couple weeks ago and only found out about the failing issue the day after I placed my order (by my own fault, I skimmed the article about the 840/840 Pro). I did immediately check the firmware on my drive and all is well. I haven't had any issues with my drive, and I'm glad to know Samsung is willing to disclose the exact nature of the issue for all to know. Reply

The end user should be able to just update the firmware themselves (in the case that end users were affected). Most end users wouldn't do a secure-erase either.. I would sure check the firmware version if I bought one, though. I'm still using several 830s, but good to know this problem has been fixed. Reply

830/840 trade blows depending on what you're doing, tho the 830's probably the better investment if they're both priced similarly... They're going out of stock quick tho, and were being cleared out at pretty sweet prices well before Black Friday ($0.55 - $0.65 per GB). The 840 Pro carries a huge premium right now just for being the fastest drive out there...Reply

Yeah, I wish they were still selling the 830. I find the 840 to be a poor value for what they're asking, but the 840 Pro is way, way overpriced.

The 830 hits a middle of the road in performance and price, a perfect spot really, but Samsung has thrown all that away to fleece everyone either with the crap drive at a higher price than it deserves or the great drive again at a much higher price than it deserves.

It's a shame. They had it perfect with the 830. I wish they hadn't taken it off the market. Even before the clearing prices, it was still well below the 840 Pro's cost.Reply

The only reason why the 840 seems like a poor value is because the 830 sold for so cheap. If Samsung had not released the 840 series, the 830 would not have been such a bargain because Samsung would not have had a need to get rid of their 830s.

From what I have seen by following the prices, the 840 is actually a fairly good deal compared to other SSDs. I just did a pricing table to an upcoming review a few days ago and the 840 was the cheapest of them all.Reply

I agree, people are being way too harsh on the 840... Even if the 830 never existed, the 840 would still be a good buy compared to similar drives like the Crucial M4, Plextor M5S, etc. Some people are just mad they missed out on deals for what was basically a clearance item, if you're pinching pennies that strongly then just wait for the next similar scenario (for instance, I'm sure there'll be an M4 replacement eventually).Reply

In Anandtechs light workload benchmark, the 840 is faster than the 830, in the heavy benchmark it's the other way around. In the read/write benchmarks they trade blows with the 840 being a lot better in random r/w benchmarks.It also dropped price from ~195€ for 250GB at introduction to 155€ right now. The lowest the 830 256GB got was 145€ and it is now at 165€. I don't think there is anything wrong with these prices and I expect the 840 to drop even lower.Now, the 840 Pro is really too expensive for normal desktop consumer users. But if the extra speed will increase your work productivity, it will probably be worth it.I'll be looking forward to a 250 GB 840 for my system and down the road another 500 GB one for my games. :DAnd the new headline is much better and less confusing, thanks for that.Also, is there a chance that the spare area test will be done with a 840 non-pro? I'd really be interested in the IO latency @ stock and with 25% spare area. :)Reply

I wonder how many tweaks the "Reviewer" firmware had to get good numbers, that the "Shipping" firmware doesn't have? If this is Samsung's idea of quality control and proper validation of an SSD before releasing it to the meida for review, I'd say they failed miserably.Reply

If they had waited to release it with the shipping firmware to reviewers, thus delaying any credible reviews until after it was available in retail, I'm sure people would say that they were afraid of bad reviews and wanted to cash in before they started to appear. I don't see the big deal here, pre-retail samples die all the time in every category. That's why they are pre-retail. Reply

That's kind of a cynical point of view, though a valid one I guess, I'm sure Anandtech will re-run tests on a different capacity 840/840 Pro at some point though. The bug, as explained in this news article, wouldn't really affect performance, so it doesn't support your theory...

I'd say the better question would be whether they discovered this bug on their own and fixed it before drives shipped out, or whether they were only made aware of it once Anand/Kristian and others reported drive failures w/the review samples...

If it's the former, I'd say that speaks highly of Samsung's validation (they were testing it even after review samples were sent out), if it's the latter then I guess it's a bit of black eye on their part but they still deserve credit for a really quick turnaround on the fix.Reply

I bought two of these last week (both with the newest firmware - verified) to test under RAID0 for benchmarking and as far as BIOS or Windows is concerned, they don't exist at all when paired in RAID on the AMD SB950 (with newest BIOS firmware).

I know this is a problem with the 840 because, to confirm my suspicions, I pulled several SSDs out of my pile to put on RAID, and they all worked flawlessly.

I am still very disgruntled with this product. "Buyer Beware" until they come out with yet another firmware revision.Reply

Both of these drives did not work straight out of the packaging. Yes, they only do not work when in a RAID. When out of RAID they work fine. However, when in any form of RAID configuration on the AMD SB950 Southbridge (990FX, a popular chip right now) the drive is INVISIBLE to both BIOS and Windows, even after all drivers are installed.

I have confirmed that this is the fault of the drive, as several other SSDs that I have work fine in RAID, thus ruling out any board, BIOS, or chipset problem.

Are you suggesting that somehow a secure erase will make the drive work, or are you wondering if I have tried a secure erase to see if it shuts down the drive, as it has with previous models? In case of the latter, I have not attempted a secure erase at all.

I can understand a mistake in development, so therefore I will be contacting Samsung to see if I can get either confirmation that they know about the issue and are working on a fix, a replacement drive of a different model, or my money back. How they answer will determine whether they are up to snuff as a reliable company or not. I will post results back when I get them.Reply

Definitely contact Samsung then. Validation is always limited to certain setups, so it's possible that not so common setups face a bug (unfortunately this usually means AMD). Especially RAID is probably not tested on every possible setup that exists given that the regular 840 is mainly meant for mainstream users (who don't even know what RAID is). This happens a lot with laptops because the OEMs often customize BIOS which can cause issues.

If you can't get any proper help through the regular customer service, drop me an email (kristian[AT]anandtech[DOT]com) and I'll forward it to the right people.Reply

After nearly a week on the phone with Samsung technical support, I learned that their entire tech support department is actually outsourced to another company. They are kept in the dark about a lot of issues, and are also not given the power to make important decisions about returns. I was told that turn-around time for an issue like mine could be several days to weeks before permission is granted.

If a customer has a ten to thirty day return window on a product, this is unacceptable.

On the very first day, I was told to return the drives to the retailer where I got them, and even after I explained that I had a "replace only" purchase, they still balked about taking care of me. I felt that it was their issue, and trying to be a good customer, I VERY GENEROUSLY asked if I could downgrade my drives to some known working models, such as the 830 for NO MONEY ACROSS THE TABLE. After all, their product did not do what they claimed it would do. I was instead tasked with 5 days worth of troubleshooting before they would consider writing a letter to their parent company in Korea to "ask" for permission to return the items. In those five days, THEY TOLD ME THAT THEY NEVER GOT AROUND TO SENDING THAT EMAIL.

On evening three, I learned ON MY OWN that Samsung had VERY QUIETLY rolled out a firmware update. On day four of negotiating with their outsourced tech support department, I asked about the firmware update. I was told that it was only for issues with the Trim. This was also not true. I will go into that more in a minute.

I was asked to try to flash the firmware, anyway. The flash from my motherboard failed, and Samsung tech support responded by asking me to find another computer to try it on. Luckily, I have several around the house. I tried the firmware update on my wife's computer, and it would not work. I then went out to my workshop, where I have some older motherboards. I had to scrounge together a power supply, memory, and a hard drive, installed windows and Magician, and it worked.

As an aside, part of the problem was that the Samsung Magician software is not functioning as it should. It gives three options to attempt to flash your firmware. The first is within Windows, using Magician its self, and the other two use a bootable usb flash drive, and a bootable CDROM option. The thumb drive and CDROM both use FreeDos as an operating environment to run their software. The problem with the USB drive option was that Samsung coded the FreeDos boot procedures wrong, and it tried to load its kernel from the wrong drive letter that it had assigned itself. The CDROM, on the other hand, told me that there was no firmware found on the disk which Magician burned. That left me with only the Windows option.

These are grave errors on the part of Samsung. One problem I can understand, but every single option firmware option in the Magician software is broken in some way. On the upside, I've been informed that Samsung has plans to re-design Magician from the ground up. This is a positive note. At least they're working hard to fix known issues.

For right now, though, their maintenance software is junk.

Back to the lying. Even though I was told that the firmware fixes were small TRIM adjustments, both of my drives exhibited the same problems before the firmware update, refused to update on the same motherboards, and then exhibited the same behavior AFTER the updates.

They lied to me, and to their own customer service people. It WAS INDEED a fix. I did not like being misled, and I will not be purchasing any more Samsung products in the future. I will vote with my wallet, and try to support a company that has customer satisfaction as the number one concern.

Ah, the joys of a free market. I can take my business elsewhere, thereby encouraging healthy competition.

There is a gentleman out there at Samsung tech support named Jose. Jose bent over backwards to try to make me happy, and he needs a commendation for his excellence in service, but he was being stonewalled by Samsung at every pass. THANK YOU, Jose. I can not tell you enough how much I appreciated your hard work. You need a raise and possibly a promotion. Merry Christmas, Jose. I wish the best for you and for your family.

Basically, even though Samsung tells them nothing, the guys in their tech support company are finding fixes for themselves through trial and error (and dissatisfied customers). They're trying to satisfy their contract from Samsung and do a good job anyway. That is a sad situation, right there, Samsung. FIX IT.

Although I'm surprise Samsung didn't find this in their internal testing and fix the bug before sending out your review samples. Maybe they already found it and were working on the fix when they sent out your drives. Anyway good to know it won't affect production units. Reply

No data lost as I don't put anything critical on my R0 arrays, but I lost the whole thing.My ASUS board would not boot to bios with both drives connected - the boot device LED would light up solid and Id have s black screen. If I unplugged one, it would boot up fine, and of course the OROM would show my I had a failed array. Took me a while to figure this out.I then booted off another W7 SSD I have for maintenance and both drives appeared healthy in RST when I plugged them both back in, while not running as a system disk. The array verified fine. As soon as I would reboot and the bios would try to read the array (which it does even before posting) I'd get a black screen. Nothing. Unplug either of the two drives and it would post.After dicking around for an hour trying everything, I destroyed the array (1 disk at a time) boot off the other SSD, secure erased both Pros and rebuilt the array. It boots fine again and I installed a base OS without issues. I'm not happy - I have never seen this behavior before in 30+ SSD RAID 0 setups.It's like the array's metadata got corrupted or something. I do not trust these drives right now and am a step away from returning them.A couple points:*drives ran fine without a hitch for a 1.5 weeks in RAID0*both drives have been secure erased probably 6-8 times each*drives never actually died. They were recoverable with a secure erase. The bios refused to post with them in a R0 array.*both drives are on the latest firmware*this sucks because I've got a total of 4 of these drives on my systems and am not feeling real confident right now

-Anandtech, please send this info to Samsung if you have a fast channel to their SSA tech group, thanks.Reply

So I know weird things happen and I was going to chalk this up as a fluke because I absolutely despise when people spread/feed FUD on these kinda of things. However, the poster above me with the AMD setup is what has me worried. His drives are fine until they are put into an array. That is similar to what I experienced, the difference is mine we're fine for almost 2 weeks and are running in another array, again, right now. For how long? Nobody knows.Reply

What chipset do you have? Or better yet, what exact motherboard? The more specs I have, the easier it is for me to inform Samsung. I don't have two 840/840 Pros at the moment so I can't try to recreate the issue, but I'll definitely drop them a note once I have the specs I need.Reply

Hi Kristian, thanks for the quick response.System is an ASUS P8P67 Deluxe B3, BIOS 3509 (modded OROM 11.6.x.x for TRIM, which works fabulously, btw). 128k stripe. I will note I swapped cables and even switched both drives to 2 spare intel SATA2 ports - still would not post until I unplugged one of the drives. Once I broke the array, system posted fine with both drives plugged in. As stated earlier, I was able to recreate the array and load up an OS. Reply

You guys should put two drives like the 840s in RAID0 on a z77 board and run it through your storage bench! It seems like a popular setup, and i'm considering it myself. TRIM should work okay with the new drivers, but i'm curious how it scales and if there are any quirks or drawbacks with on-board raid with these SSD drives.Reply

I got a 512gb 840 Pro a few weeks back. I performed the latest firmware upgrade just over a week ago.

Two days ago, the drive wasn't detected when the PC was turned on. As it's a drive dedicated to Steam, it wasn't too catastrophic, fixed with a simple power cycle.

Same again today, except I can't resurrect it. I've swapped all cables, tried a different controller, moved over to another PC and done the same there. It is, officially, dead.

I'll get it returned, but I'm fairly happy it's my Steam drive (which I'd backed up to NAS when I installed the drive) as I can recover easily. However, I was testing the drive with a view to using as an O/s drive as well, not to mention rolling out in my fiancées studio PC and other PCs I'll build for people going forward. This gives me pause, unsurprisingly!Reply

My first 840 Pro started disappearing randomly, often long after the computer had been booted. Rebooting usually brought it back.

Then it didn't. CheckDisk ran, and when it was done, half my files were gone. (But backed up, so I didn't freak.)

Samsung swapped it for a drive with DXM04B0Q firmware on December 17.

That drive is starting to go. It started disappearing. CheckDisk just ran. No files seem to be missing, but this is beyond frustrating. Do I swap it for another? Is there any hope that another one will be better, or is there something bigger wrong? The two 830 drives in the same machine seem fine. Got them on sale when the 840 pro was being released.Reply

How did this even make it into a preproduction firmware for a device in late 2012?

This is the exact same issue that a large variety of Samsung eMMC flash chips made in 2011. They fixed the issue in late 2011.

At the very least: VYL00M, KYL00M, MAG4FA fwrev 0x19 all had this EXACT same bug. VYL00M fwrev 0x25 (present in the Galaxy Nexus) did not. They were aware of this early enough that the mainline Linux kernel was patched to avoid this issue in early September:

I can tell you that Samsung was fully aware that secure erase was an issue in many of their flash chip firmwares in June 2012 - so how was it that even preproduction firmware had not been properly tested with secure erase in late September 2012, nearly a year after they had fixed the same firmware bug in their eMMC chips.

I would not be surprised if one of Samsung's SSDs released late in 2013 starts dying after a few months of usage just like VTU00M fwrev 0xF1 (found in many GT-I9300 phones) did, considering how mobile device eMMC bugs seem to show up in their desktop products after about a year.Reply

I have been trying to update the firmware in my 840 in my macbook pro. It seems to be a bit complicated. It works fine as it is except you cam't close the lid as it will not wake up. (I have seen this before with a kingston) Also in reading this and other forums I have repeatedly seem testimonies that it is a fast drive, but that is not so in my Mac. It boots in 30 seconds which is twice as fast as a spinner but OWC and Crucial drives boot in 10. Is this a firmware issue or is the 840 really that much slower? Anyone know?Reply

Here's the story, and a plea for help (see the end of message) from someone knowledgeable :

I bought two 840 Pro (256Gb) in mid February 2013.Both came with DXM03B0Q firmware.As I purchased after reading through all relevant 840 Pro AnandTech articles I was aware of the firmware issues and the first thing I've done was upgrading (from bootable ISO created with Samsung Magician) to version DXM04B0Q.

One of the drives was setup as system drive with Win 8 Pro.That drive has been going since and hasn't thrown any problems at all.

As I said the system drive is going strong (fingers crossed) so the rest of the story concerns the other (storage) drive.

All was well for a while.After a couple of months the drive started "disappearing" from SATA bus.This behaviour was random and I could never recreate it at will (technician's nightmare).A reboot or a Cold Boot would always bring it back, though.In the process, I eliminated SATA cables and ports by replacing cables and running the drive from a different port.

The other day the drive has gone for good.It appears dead.Well, almost - read on.

Almost all symptoms I'm having are same or similar to other tales of 840 Pro woes I, since, read.

Drive does not show inside BIOS nor on the POST screen readouts.When connected to SATA bus it is preventing my machine from booting to desktop.The machine's HDD access LED stays firmly lit during boot-up process and the screen never gets to desktop.If I physically disconnect the drive during the boot-up the said HDD access LED resumes the usual random flashes indicating reading from System Drive and System loading and, seconds later the boot completes and I get to the desktop.

If I now connect the faulty drive again - (My MoBo supports HotPlugging) the HDD access LED lights up solid but no drive appears in Windows explorer or Windows Disk Management console.

The drive appears in Device manager, however, but under a generic name, ie : "SAMSUNG SATA SSD" (caps intentional) as opposed to "Samsung SSD 840 PRO Series" (which is how my System drive appears next to it under Device Manager). My "Safely Remove Hardware" green icon also appears in the System tray and lists the drive (under "SAMSUNG SATA SSD").If I attempt to click on it - nothing happens (ie : no usual message "Safe to Remove", etc ...).All the while, from the moment of hot-plugging the drive the HDD access LED stays firmly lit.

If I leave the drive connected and proceed to shut down the machine I get the same behaviour as the one described during the start-up, ie :HDD access LED stays lit while the machine remains in "Shutting Down" screen yet never actually shuts down until I physically pull the drive out from the HotPlug bay. At this point HDD access LED resumes the familiar flashing pattern indicating read/write processes on System Drive and the machine eventually shuts down after a few seconds.

I eliminated further variables by connecting it as an external drive using a SATA->USB3 enclosure.No play :(

As I have some data on this drive I'd hate to loose (surprise, surprise ...) - here's my $1000000 question :

Since the drive entry appears in Device Manager after hot-plugging the drive - is there any Windows-based (not DOS) software that will allow me to access the drive to perform either a firmware re-flash (a new DXM05B0Q firmware is now available) or data recovery ?

To recap : the drive does not appear in BIOS nor Windows Explorer nor Windows Disk Management Console nor is it seen by Samsung Magician nor any other Windows (or DOS - I tried SpinRite) utilities I know of.

Please advise.

PS(I have obtained an RMA from the original retailer - Ebuyer, here in UK but I'd like to exploit all possible data recovery options before I send it off).Reply

I purchased my Samsung 840 Pro 256gb in March of 2013. I have been experiencing the same problems as yourself and today it finally seems to of died. I can't figure out how to try updating firmware like yourself and it seems impossible. Parted Magic can't see the drive as well. Exactly the same symptoms as yourself though.. Reply

Looks like I am in the same boat as you guys, now with a broken 840 Pro 256GB drive!Mine just died today.It does not show up in BIOS any longer, and when trying to find i hooked up to a USB cradle, it shows a 100MB uninitialized.If I try to initialize it as MBR, WIndows reports an I/O error has occured.No luck so far getting any data from the drive :(Reply

Can anyone help? My 840PRO failed a few days ago. A check also shows only 0.93GB, SN: nil and Firmware: IE'. And when you go to do the performance test on magician, it says "no volumes found on selected drive". Windows fails to boot. I get "media failure, check plug" message. I lost all my past 8 months worth of travel pics. Is there anyone who can help? What are the chances of recovering my data?Reply